It is well known to reconstitute leather waste into so-called leather board using adhesives. However, the resulting material does not have the suppleness and feel of natural leather due to the stiffening effect of the adhesives used to bond the fibres. Furthermore, the usual shredding and impact processes used to extract the fibres result in very short very fine fibres which give low strength products.
Much longer and more robust textile fibres are known to be formed into non-woven products without adhesives using hydroentanglement (or spunlacing) whereby very fine jets of water are directed into a fibre web at very high pressure to cause mechanical interlocking of the fibres. This can produce strong sheet material with good drape and handle but the lengths of fibres used are generally orders of magnitude longer and thicker than reclaimed leather fibres. It is also known to hydroentangle textile microfibres but these are supplied in the form of bundles of fibres which are temporarily bound together in larger diameters for ease of processing, and subsequently split or separated either by chemical means or in gradual steps by the force of hydroentanglement itself.
Leather fibres are quite unlike those conventionally used in hydroentanglement, and this technique has not been used hitherto with this material.